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During the post-war American occupation of Japan, romance blooms between All-American Country Boy Billy and City Girl Akiko. Billy carries Akiko off to what she hopes will be an American paradise, which turns out to be a small town in Central Iowa. The couples' twenty-year journey through sickness, war, economic hardship and finally, family tragedy, unfolds before a nostalgic panorama of twentieth-century pop culture seemingly defying the ominous...

This book takes its place alongside the unnerving, memorable, darkly funny family memoirs of Augusten Burroughs and Mary Karr. It's a father-daughter tale perfectly suited to the graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian house, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out,...